October Artists in Residence Open Studios

Miguel Arzabe – San Francisco, CA
San Francisco-based artist Miguel Arzabe holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, with an MS in Environmental Fluid Dynamics from Arizona State University and an MFA from University of California Berkeley. Arzabe’s work was selected for Hors Pistes 2011 and 2012 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The More Things Change at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Lightness and Dark at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. He was commissioned for a site-specific installation at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History for LAND/ART New Mexico. Arzabe’s work is held in private and public collections, nationally and internationally.

Najwan Darwish – Jerusalem, Palestine
Najwan Darwish is apoet from Jerusalem (Palestine). In 2009, the Hay Festival Beirut39 pronounced him one of the 39 best Arab writers under the age of 40. Since publishing his first book of poetry in 2000, his poems have been translated into over ten languages, including a recent French translation by Antoine Jockey, Je me lèverai un jour (2012). His Selected Poems, translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, will be published in 2014 by New York Review Books.

Darwish is also a literary editor and a cultural critic. As a cultural practitioner he co-founded, directed and advised several key projects in the fields of literature, visual arts, theater, creative writing education, cultural journalism and publishing. Darwish is the literary advisor to the Palestine Festival for Literature (Palfest).

Ingrid Duch – Odense, Denmark
The City of Odense is my place of birth and is still my permanent base. I graduated from the Odense Academy of Fine Arts in 1982, after 5 years of studies primarily in painting and graphic arts. After graduation I spent two months in Paris. Looking back I can see that it was here in the ethnological museums I began a life-long search for motif and content in my work. It was a revelation. The expression in the patterns, the accuracy of depicting animals and creatures born in dreams and fantasy was overwhelming. During my two extended stays in Egypt on stipends for a total of two years in 1988/89 and 1991/92 I practiced in Cairo and Alexandria, connected to the Art Academies in these two cities. I concentrated on the art of the Pharaonic period as well as early Coptic art. In Alexandria, the intercultural influences between the Mediterranean cultures became the main goal of my work. During my stay in Egypt I planned and realized exhibitions in Cairo with my own work as well as other artists. Back in Denmark I continued to establish myself in my atelier where I integrated my experience from Egypt into my work. This work has lead to many exhibitions and the sale of most of my work to private collectors and many reviews in the Danish press. I have been included in most of the Danish artist yearbooks. Continuing my search for new impulses, I have been in Istanbul, southern France, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona as well as the northwestern USA and Canada. A significant period was the three years, 1988-2001, when a colleague and I established and ran the Pavilion, a summer cafe and meeting place for hundreds of people in the cultural scene. The Pavilion was subsidized by the City of Odense. As an active member of The Print Workshop of Fyn I explored the many techniques and have exhibited in many venues. My work is exhibited in traveling exhibitions in various countries. I have held classes in some of the places I have visited. My connection with the Odense Museum of Art has included teaching aspirants for the Art Academy and participating in special exhibitions.

Fidencio Duran – Austin, TX
Fidencio Duran tells visual stories that honor the history of his family and community. These stories sprang from recollections of his father’s storytelling. “My dad used to tell us small parables about the consequences of being greedy or other moral lessons. He also wanted us to know where we came from, and all those folk stories stuck with me.” Duran’s artwork appears in public and private art collections in the United States and abroad. His works have been exhibited by institutions from Museo El Centenario in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, IL, Amarillo Art Museum, Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, TX, Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, NM to Smithsonian Latino Center/Fundacion Osde in Buenos Aires, Argentina. One of Duran’s most prominent works, The Visit, graces the length of the ticket counter at the Austin Bergstrom International Airport. Duran has the distinction of being the only artist to receive all three of the Dallas Museum’s Awards to Artists. He was awarded the Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund Award in 1983, the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund Award in 1990, and the Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant in 1996. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin and has taught and lectured at UT, Austin Community College and Texas State University in San Marcos.

Loren Erdrich – Brooklyn, NY
Loren Erdrich is a Brooklyn based mixed-media visual artist working primarily in drawing, sculpture, performance and video. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, both individually and as part of CultureLab Collective. A 2011 show in San Marcos, TX featured her work alongside that of Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Félix González-Torres. In May 2011 she was featured in a Vogue Italia photo essay of female artists to watch in NYC by photographer Francesco Carrozzini. Together with poet Sierra Nelson she co-founded Invisible Seeing Machine, a collaborative art group, which in 2010 won the NYU Washington Square Review Prize for Collaboration for their lyrical choose-choose-your-own-adventure book I Take Back the Spongecake, combining drawings, poems, and collaboratively written poetry (forthcoming publication by Rose Metal Press, Spring 2012). Her work has been featured in Carol Novak’s ‘Giraffes In Hiding: the mythical memoirs of Carol Novak’ (Spuyten Duyvil, 2010), ALARM Press Magazine, the album covers of Taperecorder, and many poetry and art blogs. She has been awarded residencies at Art Farm Nebraska in 2010 and 2011, Sculpture Space in 2010, and the Vermont Studio Center in 2008.

Lori Esposito – Providence, RI
Lori Esposito is interested in transgressing such divisions as between body and drawing, psyche and lines, symmetry and psychological states, sitting and impermanence, experience and form. Growing up in a bi-racial, bi-coastal family meant navigating a complex terrain of social, environmental and economic perspectives. While shifting between Caucasian and African American cultures, she came to understand the world as one place with gradient rather than fixed boarders. Her practice has formed from an interest in the way social understandings are constructed. Denying the boundaries of separation of a textual understanding of the world, Loris drawings are an attempt to model her perception of a borderless terrain, one where the uniqueness of difference is preserved. These underlying abstract principals are explored through primal communication and body movements recorded as gestures that transcend time and space. She seeks to reveal the state she has come to believe we all inhabit.

Denise Gantt – Seattle, WA
Kumani Gantt’s performance and literary work has been described as a “thoughtful, evocation of love and loss” by the Baltimore Sun. Her plays and performance pieces include meditations/from the ash, winner of the Artscape 1997 Best Play Contest and voted Best New Play by the Baltimore Alternative; Three Stories to the Ground, written with Gabriel Shanks and winner of the Theatre Project Outstanding Vision In Theatre award; anatomy/lessons selected as part of Penumbra Theater’s Cornerstone Project; and Communion written with actress Vanessa Thomas for Washington, DC’s Horizons Theater, and Testament, a play inspired by Antigone performed by the Village of Arts and Humanities in 2006. In 2003, her collection of poetry, conjuring the dead, was awarded the Maryland Emerging Writers Award by poet, Afaa Michael Weaver. She holds a MFA in Theatre Performance from Towson University. Her new play in progress, The Gift, received a staged-reading at Seattle’s, ACT in June 2011.

Megan Hildebrandt – Tampa, FL
Megan Hildebrandt was born in 1984 in Detroit, and earned her BFA in Art and Design at the University of Michigan in 2006. Hildebrandt has traveled to artist residencies in Baltimore, Vermont, Washington, Michigan, and New Mexico since 2007. Her solo and group exhibitions include New American Paintings, Anna Kustera Gallery, The Front, The University of Alberta, the Museum of Contemporary Craft, and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum. Hildebrandt’s autobiographical drawings have been collected by Johns Hopkins Hospital, William Beaumont Hospital, New College, and the Diane and Sandy Besser Collection.
In 2009, at age 25, Hildebrandt was diagnosed with cancer, an experience which led to her current large-scale drawing project, Counting Radiation. In 2012 she received her MFA in painting and drawing from the University of South Florida.

Alexandra Kleeman – Brooklyn, NY
Alexandra Kleeman grew up in Colorado and holds a master’s degree in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley, and undergraduate degrees in Cognitive Science and Literary Arts from Brown University. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Conjunctions, and Zoetrope, and is forthcoming in Tin House and Triple Canopy. She currently lives in Brooklyn, and will complete her MFA at Columbia University in May of 2012.

Faith Purvey – Los Angeles, CA
Faith Purvey’s work embodies temporary public sculpture, installation, painting and photography. Her projects deal with issues of habitation, urban infrastructure, transience, and nature, often employing collective and ephemeral sculpture-building processes. She also collaborates with other artists, youth, civic and community leaders.
Purvey received a BS in Art with honors from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, and an MFA from Otis College of Art, Los Angeles in 2010, where she studied with Suzanne Lacy. Originally from Minneapolis and currently based in Los Angeles, she has developed public projects and has exhibited work nationally.